Offers an alternative way of thinking about management that is based on the management experience of uncertainty.

Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously. Ralph Stacey has turned to the sciences of uncertainty and complexity to develop an understanding of leadership and management as the ordinary politics of daily organizational life. In presenting organizations as a series of complex responsive processes, Stacey’s new book helps us to see organizational reality for what it actually is – human beings engaged in many, many local conversational interactions and power relations in which they negotiate their ideologically based choices. Organizational continuity and change emerge unpredictably, rather than as a result of any overall plan. This is a radically different picture from the one painted by most of the management literature, which explains "organizational continuity and change" as the realization of the global plans and choices of a few powerful executives within an organization. Providing a new foundation for understanding complexity and management, this important book is required reading for managers and leaders wanting to understand the reality of complexity in organizations, including those engaged in postgraduate studies in leadership, organizational behaviour and change management.

Complexity theory is generating increasing interest amongst strategic thinkers. This fascinating book covers issues such as predictability, creativity and relationships as it considers how complexity, and its central principles of emergence and self-organization, are being used to understand organizations. The book: introduces the variety of views put forward by different writers on complexity and management outlines and critiques the way that complexity theory is frequently interpreted purely in the context of systems thinking draws a new perspective on using complexity sciences to understand organizational stability and change by focusing on the emergence of novelty and creativity in the course of everyday processes calls for a radical re-examination of management thinking. Timely and controversial, Complexity and Management is essential reading for anyone interested in strategy, systems thinking, organization and management theory, and organizational change.

The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control. So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what’s possible for managers to achieve? Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways. Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective.

This book places everyday talk and role-modelling interactions at the forefront of an alternative change-leadership agenda, and introduces a number of practical approaches to help line managers and organizational specialists deliver this agenda more successfully. It is essential reading for organizational practitioners at all levels.

Focusing on the essential uncertainty of participating in evolving events as they happen, this book considers the creative possibilities of such participation from a complexity perspective.

Although chaos theory refers to the existence between seemingly random events, it has been gaining the attention of science, technology and managements fields. The shift from traditional procedures to the dynamics of chaos and complexity theory has resulted in a new element of complexity thinking, allowing for a greater capability for analyzing and understanding key business processes. Chaos and Complexity Theory for Management: Nonlinear Dynamics explores chaos and complexity theory and its relationship with the understanding of natural chaos in the business environment. Utilizing these theories aids in comprehending the development of businesses as a complex adaptive system.